From her Q & A with Barbara Chai at the Wall Street Journal's books blog:
--Marshal ZeringueSo how did you construct your vampire character?
In “Overbite,” he is the son of Dracula, who was Vlad the Impaler. He’s the son of him, he is not himself a mass serial killer, but he’s the prince of darkness. So when you have that legacy, can you fight against it? I like to put something in the book that is something I’m kind of struggling with, with things going on in my family, and that’s at what point does somebody hurt you so many times that you kind of cut them out of your life? How many times you forgive them, because everybody does have some goodness in them, but there are some people who have some bad. In the book, there’s a demon-hunting unit from the Vatican. The Vatican and Catholicism is all about forgive and turn the other cheek. But in this story, the Vatican has to kill all the demons, and my heroine, who’s in love with the prince of darkness, says maybe some of these demons have good in them and the guy she’s dating does, but there’s a lot of bad in him too. She keeps asking well maybe we can try to redeem them. Isn’t Catholicism all about redemption? I don’t know if this is something that was very deeply explored in a lot of the vampire books that are...[read on]